What tools are available for recovering corrupted NTFS partitions?

Good day to all.

I have an older netbook that normally has a 500GB drive installed in it. The drive is partitioned as a 15GB "C" drive, with the rest going to the "D" partition.

I was asked to loan the machine for a few weeks and thought that I'd save myself possible problems by pulling the existing drive and installing an un-used sata drive with a fresh Windows XP installation, fully patched. That let the borrower have a machine with the fastest possible speed and saved my working drive from damage or tampering.

I just got the machine back - the borrower was very happy with it. However, upon re-installing my original drive, I got the infamous "NTLDR is missing" error message. I obviously messed up somehow but I'm not sure what.

Because this is a netbook without optical drive, I decided to just pull the drive and use one of my USB - IDE / SATA adapters to see what the problem was. And here it gets interesting.

The "D" partition is fine - I can see all of the files and directories. However, the "C" partition is un-readable.

If this were a FAT-32 partition, I'd just fire up my old copy of Norton Disk Doctor and see what was up. But: its formatted NTFS and I don't have any diagnostic / repair tools for NTFS volumes.

So: before I give up and just restore my last image (one and a bit years old), I thought that I'd ask the general community how others would tackle this particular problem. I won't lose anything important if I do just restore that old image but I'd like to learn if this is something that can be easily fixed.

I would install the disk as a second drive in another machine and see what shows up. Don't run any repair tools on it until you have imaged it / backed it up. Don't try to repair it in a USB enclosure because these units hide the disk from repair tools.

The first thing to do is to see if check disk will run against the bad partition. If that does not work then I would recommend that you just reinstall the OS and all your programs. That will probably be faster in the long run. Unless I had data on the partition that I really needed I would just start over.

The first thing to do is to see if check disk will run against the bad partition

Well, I must be tired or something - it never even occurred to me to run chkdsk. I left the drive connected to my IDE / SATA - USB adapter and did just that. Chkdsk did make the drive bootable after finding several thousand lost fragments. There is sufficient damage that I don't want to even try to recover from this, given that I have a known-good image to fall back upon.

But - it let me at least document what had been installed since I took the last image more than a year ago. Not all that much, actually. I just made a list of all applications installed after the date of the most recent image and saved it to the "D" partition.

Acronis has just now finished restoring that year-old image and everything looks good. Now I'm off to install all of the intervening Windows updates.